YESTERDAY THE MOON
Yesterday the moon was a swan on gentle water.
Tonight it comes up like a used ashtray
somebody stubbed their eyes out in.
I could be a nightbird in a bad dream
and slip myself like a message
from a distant constellation under your door
but there’s something tedious about the stars
mindlessly spinning overhead era after era
like a loom in a sweat factory flatlining.
I resist the sway of the metaphor
by staying rooted in the mud of the mindstream.
Happiness just happens. Happ, an Icelandic word,
(remember Snori Sturlesson and the Viking skalds?)
means luck, grace, good fortune
but like a stone, like a planet
you keep turning yourself over to look for it.
You can crack your emotions open
for another thousand lifetimes
like fortune cookies
that have had their tongues torn out
and never find it.
First and last, the moon
may be an Arabic sabre,
the beginning and breaking of a long fast,
the alpha and omega of extremes,
a holy war,
but you never heed the phases in between
as you live from cover to cover
like the front and backdoor
of every heresy and revelation
that eventually shreds you like paper in an abandoned embassy.
I don’t know what your heart’s wired to anymore,
your body still supple and pliable
as C-4 under a bridge,
and you’re always dangerously appealing
when you let your candles dance with your scalpels
in a lethal alliance of science and art
that pushes down hard on my libido like a plunger
that wants to set you off
like a real apocalypse on a Halloween night
tricked out like the treat of the bedsheet ghost that haunts me. Boo.
Sex is an exorcist.
But with you,
it drove the human out of the demon
and charged the darkness with raving angels
that fell like snow on a furnace.
If I didn’t know any better
I’d say love was a delusion of snakeoil
and all its fire-eyes, the testing tines of its flame,
soot on a lamp, why nothing is seen here
expect through a glass darkly.
Or maybe it’s a disease you take
to get through the cure?
But I’m not a saint.
I won’t paint my window to improve the view.
I like to look clearly into things
until there’s no seer, no seen,
just this whisper of seeing like water
in the voice of a bottomless well
that drinks like a dragon from the skull of an ominous moon.
PATRICK WHITE
